In the wake of Penguin, I’ve been getting asked this question A LOT. I think it’s finally time for my answer.

Penguin has changed everything – oh wait, no it hasn’t. All it did was penalize those for doing what they knew was wrong, but the only difference is that Google actually followed through with some of their threats on bad links.

As of Jan 29, 2012 there have been 43,277,689 downloads of 1,468 different WordPress themes.

This is just from the WordPress.org repository. Think about that, almost every free WordPress theme has a link back to the creator – that’s millions of backlinks generated by distributing WordPress themes.

I know what you’re thinking, “I do SEO, not design or development!” Guess what? You’re …

Opportunities are all around you. They’re your chance to get noticed, build rapport with the right people, and in the long run, snag a great link or two.

An opportunity is defined as a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something. For link & relationship building, there are two types: internal and external. Internal opportunities are something you can control; for example, an awesome 404 page (here’s

Broken link building is starting to get a bad rep. People think it’s a narrow, straightforward strategy, when in reality it’s not. You can get more creative with this strategy than any other link building technique out there.

Yes, you can stick to just finding broken links on links pages & blogrolls and asking the webmaster to replace one with a link to you, but you can go way further with this strategy. Not …

I was recently tasked with training a few link builders on guest posting. Previously, their main concentration was on directory submissions. This was a good introduction for them as it gave them some basic understanding of SEO: anchor text, page value, backlinks, etc. However, manual outreach was completely foreign to them.

A few weeks ago I got an email from a reader, and he had some awesome questions. I thought I’d share them & my answers here on my blog. If you could do me a favor, please leave your thoughts in the comments below! I posted this mainly to spark a conversation.